Page 947 - war-and-peace

less eyes while his arms and legs twitched. He spoke without
himself knowing whom to or what about. ‘That’s it, come
on! That’s a dog!... There, it has beaten them all, the thou-
sand-ruble as well as the one-ruble borzois. That’s it, come
on!’ said he, panting and looking wrathfully around as if he
were abusing someone, as if they were all his enemies and
had insulted him, and only now had he at last succeeded in
justifying himself. ‘There are your thousand-ruble ones....
That’s it, come on!..’
‘Rugay, here’s a pad for you!’ he said, throwing down the
hare’s muddy pad. ‘You’ve deserved it, that’s it, come on!’
‘She’d tired herself out, she’d run it down three times by
herself,’ said Nicholas, also not listening to anyone and re-
gardless of whether he were heard or not.
‘But what is there in running across it like that?’ said
Ilagin’s groom.
‘Once she had missed it and turned it away, any mongrel
could take it,’ Ilagin was saying at the same time, breathless
from his gallop and his excitement. At the same moment
Natasha, without drawing breath, screamed joyously, ecstat-
ically, and so piercingly that it set everyone’s ear tingling. By
that shriek she expressed what the others expressed by all
talking at once, and it was so strange that she must herself
have been ashamed of so wild a cry and everyone else would
have been amazed at it at any other time. ‘Uncle’ himself
twisted up the hare, threw it neatly and smartly across his
horse’s back as if by that gesture he meant to rebuke every-
body, and, with an air of not wishing to speak to anyone,
mounted his bay and rode off. The others all followed,

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